Thursday, March 20, 2008

Who Doesn't Love a Contest?

So I received a wonderful new cookbook in the mail from a publisher to review and I just happened to get an extra copy. So guess what that means??

It can be ALL yours!

The Sweet Melissa Baking Book is a great cookbook from the owner of the Sweet Melissa Pâtisserie shops in Brooklyn. She has some very tasty French-influenced treats that I'm sure any baker would love. I have my eyes on her Guinness Gingerbread. There's also a recipe for Chocolate Espresso Cheesecake that just has to be good.

To be entered into the drawing, simply leave me a comment with the one thing in your kitchen that you simply can't live without. That's all you have to do!Enter before midnite on March 24th and the winner will be announced on March 25th. Good luck!!

72 comments:

But, I would be lost in my kitchen without my instant-read thermometer. I use it for heating water (for tea, for proofing yeast), to check baked goods and bread, and definitely to check my beef roasts. If I already have it out, I'll also use it to poke at the veggies to see if they're soft enough!

I know everyone is all about living microwave-less now, but not me. I need my microwave and I love being able to whip up something one day and then reheat it and eat it for another few days. I never get sick of leftovers.

I can't live without my Magic Bullet. I use it on a daily basis, be it to make smoothies, salad dressings, I use it for baking. I even use it to make banana-peanut butter ice cream. It's so small and so quick to clean! I don't even have a blender anymore because of it.

I cannot cook without the Learning Tower that my toddler stands on, happily playing with the water in the kitchen sink. It has revolutionized my time in the kitchen to have a happy kid getting involved, instead of a whiney monster clutching at my knees! I want that book!

While I love kitchen gadgets, I admit I could get buy without most of them. But I absolutely must have good quality knives in order to do any cooking. Right now we have a decent set of Henckels knives.

My favorite item in the kitchen is my garlic rock. Years ago when I lived on Maui, a Hawaiian woman told me to find a smooth rock that fit my hand perfectly. She showed me how to use it to smash the peels off of fresh garlic. Twenty five years later I still use my rock almost daily. Judith

With that in mind, I'll turn to something I use almost every day. Silly as it may sound, I have a "mini-serving" spatula from Pampered Chef that I absolutely love. Actually, I have two. The older one with the wooden handle is my favorite, but this one is equally marvelous.

Scoff if you must at my excessive gadget lust for a simple spatula, but this one is worthy of praise. They're perfect for small desserts just like, I suspect, the ones I could make with that fantastic book. ;-)

I am not connected with Pampered Chef in any way, outside of the fact that they have a LOT of my money and I have a LOT of their stuff. Seems like a good trade.

I absolutely could not live without my two crock pots, fabulous knives my brother gave me, and my oven we bought just after moving in. I love these kitchen items! The other thing I couldn't live without are the 6 sets of measuring cups I have...mostly to keep my 14 mo. old son occupied while I'm cooking! :)

There are many kitchen item I use a lot and find indespensible but if I need to pick one item it would be my measuring cups and spoons. I use them many time a day and absolutly couldn't live without them.

Something in my kitchen that would be very difficult to do without would be my new set of caphalon cookware especially the "everyday" piece! It was recommended by my daughter who supercedes any of the multiple generations of great cooks in our family tree.

May you be successful in our your endeavors and thank you for sharing your talents and love of cooking with others!

the tall shelves, microwave and toaster oven that I place food in/on to keep my dog from snatching delicious meals from right off the counter : ) if it weren't for these hiding places, I wouldn't get to eat anything!

I love my tongs. They're silicon at the ends, so they're no problem to use on nonstick, and the handle is metal, so you can leave them on a hot pan without worrying about them melting the way plastic stuff does. Most importantly, they're the right length to use with a pan of any kind or a wok (often I see tongs that are either made for barbecues and therefore too long for use with e.g. a frying pan, or that are way too short to use with something like a wok -- mine split the difference).

I bought my tongs on a whim thinking it would make turning meat easier. It turns out they make nearly everything easier -- most things you can do with a spatula or a spoon you can do with tongs, but better. It's as close as I can get to using my hands to move things around in a hot pan.

So it is a major toss up between my ceramic Kyocera knife and peelers and my George Foreman grill. The knives win. They only need sharpening once every few years, cut through just about anything, and are easy to maintain. Plus they don't leave a metallic taste on your food OR darken your herbs/lettuce when you cut/chop them. You just can't use them to crush garlic.

That being said, it's quite hard to decide. I don't own a very well-equiped kitchen, so I think I could live without most of the gadgets. However, my life would be a lot harder without the non-stick teflon pan (even though I've read a truckload of articles about how teflon is bad for you) and my small blender/food processor. It makes everything so much easier and is the only way I'm ever gonna make peanut butter and hummus!

Have a nice day and thanks for hosting this giveaway :} Love your blog!

I could not live without my herbs and spices-I have dozens of dried and frozen ones-and just recently purchased an Aerogro for fresh herbs. The only thing I can't grow is garlic, so I buy that in bulk!

looks like a great book! the best thing in my kitchen? it's my pink silicone spatula. it's my go-to tool and it's perfect to scrape up the sides of a bowl to cleaning out a jar of peanut butter. the small end recently snapped off but i can't part with it!

Until very recently I lived without gas, fridge, freezer and an oven.. Managed to survive that for nearly 3 months, so I feel pretty confident that I could do without any of it again. What I wouldn't want to part with is my always sharp knife and an old salad bowl my mother gave me- It's perfect, big enough for two meals and it has a lid!

Hello there! How very generous of you! While there are a lot of things I use all of the time in my kitchen, there is one (that isn't obvious) that gets almost daily use: my Calphalon pot. It's a BIG pot, so I make soups/stews in it. It's all metal, so it can go into the oven for finishing off. It's got a pasta insert, so I use that often. It's also got a steamer basket...and you know that gets used...and of course a well-fitting lid. I use it more than anything for pasta, but it was an amazing investment.

I imagine you expect from us to choose one cooking item we could not live without.But for me, the perfect kitchen does not need a special cooking gadget,what it needs is friends and family arround. What would be the point of cooking if you could not share the joy of it with people you love?

Tough choice but I'd have to say my husband. While he's not always in the kitchen, he's there at the most crucial times - prep time (keeping my 1 year old busy), meal time and most importantly, clean up.

Hmmmm, I have a couple of items in my kitchen that are "can't live without", but since you only asked for one, it would have to be my 8" chef's knife. I love it and use it so much that this past week when we were cooking for our youth group at church for their missions project that I packed it and took it with me. It is never in the knife block, because it is always in use.

I definitely do not have a very well-appointed kitchen but the one thing I have invested in is a santuko knife and I don't let anyone else touch it (and since I live with a toddler, a pre-schooler, and a klutz, that rule should probably extend to a lot more in the kitchen!).

I also find myself again and again bypassing all my vegetarian cookbooks and referring to Julia & Jacques Cooking At Home because even though I don't cook or eat 75% of the dishes, the photography and the warmth of the writing is enough to make me want to learn how to debone a chicken. And since my dear mom cooked almost exclusively from cans and boxes, the basic vegetable recipes have been invaluable.

This may sound silly, but I would be lost without my apple slicer/corer. It is from Pampered Chef and I love it! I love to eat a good cheese with an apple, yet cutting the apple up, then coring, etc. was so time consuming, I just didn't do it much. Then I got the slicer/corer and suddenly life seemed much better. :~)

It's not a utensil, it's an ingredient...Sesame oil. I grew up with it as a staple in our household (I'm half korean) and now that I'm cooking, I've been trying it in every dish, doctoring stuff up. I LOVE it. lol

If you meant utensils, then it has to be my baking sheet. I love baking much more so than cooking! lol

My pale pink linoleum floor--it's sampled every meal (and disaster) I've made, is endlessly forgiving (even if I walk all over it), and it has outlasted everything else in my kitchen. Hopelessly out of date, but still my true love.

My Joy of Cooking book is the life source in my kitchen. It was a graduation gift from a family friend. It's an early addition that she treasured for years. It has all her little notes and cooking secrets she has learned over the past 25 years. This thing will be willed to a grandchild.

A spoon that I've had since I was a kid that's about the size of a teaspoon. It's been in my possession for about 25 years, made it through 6+ moves, and I still use it almost everyday when I eat my container of Silk yogurt.

I love love love this beautiful old wooden spoon/scraper I have that my parents bought in Africa when we lived there when I was a young kid. Ever since I "borrowed" it from my mom's kitchen, where it sat lonely and unused, I've put it to good use almost every day (usually multiple times a day).

I cannot live without my kitchen scissors. My mother-in-law thinks I am insane because she has never seen anyone use scissors to cook with before, but I use them for everything: cutting chicken, cinnamon rolls, cutting asparagus, etc. Of course, I do wash them thoroughly after cutting meat before I start cutting vegetables!

Wow... that looks like a great cookbook... hope I win!I guess the thing that I couldn't live without in my kitchen would have to be my Salt & Pepper Grinders. I just love having freshly ground pepper especially on just about everything!

i couldn't live without my GIANT set of tongs. i'm a total wuss, so it helps me do stuff that i was scared to do before - like turning bacon in a pan when the fat is popping all over the place. you can also reach into the oven and flip meat that's in a roasting pan without having to pull the shelf out :)

It's going to sound sappy but I can't live without my partner, Ivan. Cooking just isn't as much fun when I do it alone. Besides, he has the most amazing palette and can whip something yummy up when I'm complaining that there isn't any food in the house.